Simple Chess Training

Making it Difficult After several years of working on my chess improvement and from talking to both amateurs and masters it appears that adult amateurs tend to complicate their chess improvement by reading books and tackling concepts that are far too advanced for their level. So, here is my attempt to...

Chess Resolutions

Farbror the Guru has challenged the chess improvement community to come up with a list of chess goals for the coming year, so here are mine: Long Term Goals Increase USCF rating to 1400 (currently at 1283) Increase Chess Tempo standard tactics rating to 1850 (currently at 1700) Increase ICC standard rating...

Overcoming Chess Training Plateaus

Plateaus and You The brain needs time to assimilate and integrate new information as knowledge and to resolve conflicts with previously learned concepts and plateaus equate to slower progress while we assimilate new ideas. Not until we internalize these new ideas as knowledge are we able to move on to the...

Chess Evolution

I played in the U 1500 section of the Miami Open a few weeks ago, and it was not a good outing. I only won one of 5 games against a much lower rated opponent. While devastated, it has only made me work harder on my chess. The week following the Open, I immediately started taking face to face lessons with FM...

Improving Chess Analysis Skills with Stoyko Exercises

This content was buried in a post for Kotov’s Method for Chess Improvement, and since it is such an important chess improvement tool, I figured I would promote it to its own post. Stoyko Exercises from Dan Heisman’s Exercises page A summary of Stoyko exercise: 1) Find a fairly complicated...